When it's fatal to forget

Sometimes we find a teaching that is expressed in terms so menacing that we heave a sigh of relief on discovering that the situation is by no means as grave as we first thought. Avot 3:10 contains one such teaching, promulgated by Rabbi Dostai beRabbi Yannai in the name of Rabbi Meir:

כָּל הַשּׁוֹכֵֽחַ דָּבָר אֶחָד מִמִּשְׁנָתוֹ, מַעֲלֶה עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ מִתְחַיֵּב בְּנַפְשׁוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: רַק הִשָּֽׁמֶר לְךָ וּשְׁמֹר נַפְשְׁךָ מְאֹד פֶּן תִּשְׁכַּח אֶת הַדְּבָרִים אֲשֶׁר רָאוּ עֵינֶֽיךָ. יָכוֹל אֲפִילוּ תָּקְפָה עָלָיו מִשְׁנָתוֹ, תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר: וּפֶן יָסֽוּרוּ מִלְּבָבְךָ כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּֽיךָ, הָא אֵינוֹ מִתְחַיֵּב בְּנַפְשׁוֹ עַד שֶׁיֵּשֵׁב וִיסִירֵם מִלִּבּוֹ

When a person forgets even a single word of his learning, the Torah considers it as if he had forfeited his life. As it states: "Only be careful, and guard your soul with care, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen". One might think that this applies also to one who [forgets because] his studies proved too difficult for him; so the verse tells us "and lest they be removed from your heart, throughout the days of your life." Thus one does not forfeit his life unless he sits down and removes them from his heart.

I would guess that there is not a single reader of this piece who would not consider him- or herself well protected by the get-out clause which Rabbi Dostai infers from Devarim 4:9. Our studies may be too difficult to retain because we couldn’t understand them in the first place, or maybe we were distracted other things happening in our lives and it was too hard for us to concentrate on them. Or again, we may have planned to have another go at learning something that was beyond us, but it was too hard for us to make time to do so because of competing priorities. And so forth. Rabbi Meir would have been quite prepared for us to justify the time we spend in not mastering Torah, for it is he who teaches (at Avot 4:12):

אִם בָּטַֽלְתָּ מִן הַתּוֹרָה, יֶשׁ לָךְ בְּטֵלִים הַרְבֵּה כְּנֶגְדָּךְ

If you neglect the Torah, you will have many excuses to give yourself

Rabbi Dostai, speaking to his own generation, is clearly pressing budding Torah scholars to be as diligent as humanly possible in absorbing, recalling and understanding their learning. It can be learned as one of a pair of mishnayot that address the same issue, the other being Rabbi Yehudah’s teaching at Avot 4:16:

הֱוֵי זָהִיר בְּתַלְמוּד, שֶׁשִּׁגְגַת תַּלְמוּד עוֹלָה זָדוֹן

Be careful with your studies, for an error of learning is tantamount to a willful transgression.

Commentators like the Me’iri take a firm line with anyone who does not retain his learning. For him, “sitting down and removing” his learning means no more than spending time on “inessential temporal needs”—a category of activities that may have been quite small in his lifetime but which must surely be vast in an era in which the leisure and entertainment industries claim so much of our attention and money.

But how should we read and understand Rabbi Dostai’s mishnah today, when the vast majority of practising Jews enjoy their learning and are generally quite committed to it in one form or another—but would never claim to be aspiring Torah scholars of the sort that we encounter in the pages of the Talmud? Some take just a hard line as the Rishonim. Thus Rabbi Reuven P. Bulka (Chapters of the Sages) views one as putting one’s soul on the line even if one has remembered one’s learning but has not internalised it. Gila Ross (Living Beautifully) applies this mishnah to anyone whose learning is lost through laziness or indifference. Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers) relocates the teaching in the realm of chassidut: one’s life is forfeited not for forgetting one thing but for forgetting the one thing—God, who is One.

I rather like an explanation of this mishnah given by Rabbi Yosef Shaul Nathanson (author of the Sho’el uMeshiv), brought by Rabbi Asher Weiss in his commentary on Avot. Rabbi Natanson picks up on the word מִמִּשְׁנָתוֹ (mimishnato, “of his learning”) and asserts that what a Torah scholar is commanded not to forget is his own learning, i.e. his own original ideas and novellae: he should write them down so that they should not be lost or forgotten. After all, if a Torah scholar forgets a halachah or devar Torah that other scholars know, it may be lost to him but it will not be lost to Jewish scholarship as a whole. But if he forgets something that only he knows, that item of knowledge may be irreplaceable—and it is that which incurs the notional penalty of death.

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